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Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

fortune.com

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Re: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

#81

Post by spprashant »

simonw wrote: post #58

Fortune articles are behind a paywall, which makes them a bad fit for Hacker News. This Reuters story carries a similar idea: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/openais-altman-sa... I'd warn that this all looks pretty thin - there are a couple of partially supporting quotes from a 45 minute virtual conversation Sam had with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) conference on Tuesday, but they don't look st…

I agree. With Altman at least it seems he is making the pivot because he thinks its better messaging. Amodei is just re-framing what he actually sees as the endgame here. He says 10x productivity, he means 10x less jobs.

Re: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

#82

Post by mustaphah »

Sam Altman and other big figures tend to shape their narratives around their personal and organizational interests. When people were skeptical, they pushed hard into the "God-like AI" narrative. Now that safety concerns are growing and their growth plans are in danger, they're pushing back against what they used to advocate.

Even if they genuinely believe what they’re saying, their perspective is still fundamentally biased and should always be taken with a healthy grain of salt.

Re: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

#83

Post by ryandrake »

ravenstine wrote: post #78
datakan wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It tells you a lot about your execs and how little they care, either for their employees or their customers. The quarterly profits are their God and they will worship at the altar of the stock price. Instead of finding ways to make AI enhance their employees and make them more productive, they immediately jump to ways to eliminate employees. It's the opposite of a growth mentallity. I'd love for these executives to s…

They have no reason to care in globalized cultures that are morally bankrupt and have no sense of citizenry to feel any amount of allegiance to. Business leaders were never perfect, but things are at least different when you have a sense that when you treat your employees and customers unfairly that you are treating your extended friends and family unfairly. The atomization of everything means that sense that your bu…

These businesses don't see themselves as corporeal parts of the world or as part of their physical, local community. They see themselves as intangible entities - bytes in the ether, spreadsheets, lacking physical substance or matter, immaterial ghosts owned by shareholders. Every other physical thing in the world, living or not, that is not a shareholder's wallet, is a resource to be used, exploited, mined, and discarded.

The Holy Grail is a business that exists without costs, employees, property, equipment, products, or even a physical location--just a virtual blob that increases a share price forever. That's ultimately the (in reality unachievable) goal end-state everyone is trying to at least approach.

Re: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

#84

Post by sumeno »

zuzululu wrote: post #4
papichulo2023 wrote: post #3

It is kinda funny the irony of going from "we are going to replace devs" to "we <3 devs, keep burning those tokens"

I don't think its as big of a deal as its made out to be. They are human after all and have overestimated the capabilities of LLMs. What's more important is that this signals product market fit.

I seriously doubt their actual beliefs* have changed in the slightest. They just see which way the wind is blowing with public sentiment and are trying to do damage control.

*I doubt they HAVE actual beliefs. Their entire job is managing PR and convincing investors.

Re: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

#85

Post by jijijijij »

iwontberude wrote: post #26
winfredJa wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are backpedaling because AI backlash is slowing down their data center builds.

Millions of Nvidia GPUs are stranded in warehouses right now with nowhere to be installed and some will be deprecated in less than a year. Good thing Micron and everyone in the supply chain is scaling up to make millions more... I am sure this will work out fine when they write down all of the inventory which is too old to install

Are you telling me I only have to wait just a little longer and the GPU are going to be really, really cheap?

Re: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

#86

Post by sbayg »

dbvn wrote: post #5

the damage is done. Why did they ever think it was a good idea to brag that they were going to destroy all middle/upper class jobs?

Because the people who funded them from the outset did so because that was their goal? The destroy all jobs talk started at least 10 years ago, it many ways that hype is the actual product itself.

Re: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

#87

Post by _23sd »

Implicit in a lot of "AI jobs apocalypse" predictions is the assumption that most tasks are ridiculously easy compared to AI research, so naturally the smart AI researchers can understand any profession well enough to credibly predict that AI will be able to replace it. I'm personally not sure the apocalypse has been truly disproven as opposed to progress just being slower than some of the overexuberant predictions, but there does seem to be a pattern of famous AI researchers predicting a job would be automated and turning out to be wrong because they focused too hard on a single aspect of it that could be automated while handwaving or ignoring the hard parts. This has prominently happened with radiology, then with customer service, and now they are walking back on programming too. Maybe take these guys with a grain of salt going forward? I trust them to be able to tell us frontier AI models will keep getting better, not to predict the impact that will have on specific industries. Some people will insist we should give them half credit for predicting there would be impact at all (as opposed to the "it's a bubble" refrain) but I think it should be possible to ignore two categories of obviously dumb predictions at the same time.

Re: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

#88

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

fg3fg wrote: post #77
chrsw wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies only want to spend money on AI in order to save more money somewhere else. So if LLMs make some tasks easier but overall don't make a big dent on shipping dates because of all the friction points you mentioned, and more, then it will be difficult to justify buying all these tokens. Even if the shipping timelines are the same but the quality goes up that still could be hard to justify token spend too.

Earnings growth, cash flows and valuation. Thats all the management at firms care about. Sorry for all the dev's here who rant about productivity gains but forget what matters to who employs them in the first place!

But it's not going to happen.

There may be some localised productivity gains, but in many of these businesses cracks will appear over the next 6-12 months as an all-AI pipeline becomes unfeasibly expensive and there's no corresponding earnings growth.

These CEOs have no clue how their companies work. They're in the driving seat of a machine they don't understand, they've been sold corporate FSD, they've turned it on like kids playing with a shiny toy, and they're about to discover it's been oversold, underbudgeted, and doesn't work yet.

Re: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

#89

Post by windexh8er »

zuzululu wrote: post #4
papichulo2023 wrote: post #3

It is kinda funny the irony of going from "we are going to replace devs" to "we <3 devs, keep burning those tokens"

I don't think its as big of a deal as its made out to be. They are human after all and have overestimated the capabilities of LLMs. What's more important is that this signals product market fit.

No. This is a ridiculous take on the recklessness Altman and Amodei have stated. Both men flat out lied, kept lying and continue to lie about their numbers and capabilities. They have literally destroyed markets that aren't coming back anytime soon (consumer hardware). They should be held accountable, not let off the hook like "Oh well, they fucked our economy long term. Guess they're just human."

Literally fuck them and an oversimplification like this.

Re: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

#90

Post by margalabargala »

aresant wrote: post #66

This is an absolutely classic PR "submarine" effort to reframe the impact of AI Paul Graham has mandatory essay on this - https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html (1) More than 50% of Americans at this point are more concerned about AI than excited for it - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findi... (2) Popular media is feeding into this zeitgeist with headlines like - "Prepare for an AI jobs ap…

It'll be disruptive, but not apocalyptic. Some classes of jobs common today will be eliminated, while more will grow. Overall productivity will increase, but it'll suck for the people made obsolete.

Certainly it will not result in most people working fewer hours.

Source: see the adoption of computers/databases across previously pen-and-paper industries 50 years ago. That was more disruptive than this will be.

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